Well the Bluenose Marathon is fast approaching (May 18) and I hope everyone is doing well with their training. Keep it up, we’re almost there. Myself, I am in the tapering down part of my training to ensure my legs have some time to recover before I have push myself that extra 10 km to reach 42 km. But I have had a little bit of a setback. April 27th I was doing my last long run of 32 km and around 22 km I started to develop some knee pain. Now I know the logical thing to do would have been to stop, but I was in Dartmouth and still 10 km from my apartment, so I just sucked it up and ran home.

Needless to say by the time I got home my right knee was painful, a little swollen, red, warm to touch, and yes, there was, I guess you could say, some loss of function. All the classic signs of inflammation. Wow, I do remember something from PIM! So I started with the ibuprofen and the bag of frozen peas and then skipped a few runs. Things seemed to be calming down so on Thursday I decided to test out the knee with a short 10 km run. The swelling was down but during the run the discomfort and some mild pain returned. Being so close to race day I didn’t want to mess around, so after our pharm exam I went to the University Health clinic to have my knee looked at. Well, the good news is that there is no physical damage, but the subpatellar bursa is very inflamed. So no risk of injury, but things are going to be uncomfortable for a while. So I left with my prescription for Naproxen, which thanks to pharm I now know all about it, and went to the pharmacy. I must say that I found it very humourous at the pharmacy to receive from the third year pharmacy student a 5 minute description of Naproxen including the mechanism, indications, contraindications, side effects, drug interactions, etc, but I knew she is there to get her experience (we’re all students) so I let her continue, and she did do a good job.

So the plan now is to try and balance my running to keep my endurance up during this taper down period, with a little “damage control” which will include the Naproxen and icing the knee after my running sessions. I just finished another 10 km run today (Saturday May 3) and while there definitely was some discomfort, there was no pain. So I’ll keep up with the NSAID and the icing and hopefully things will continue to improve, but I may have to resign myself to the fact that it may be an uncomfortable 42 km run (but then again, is there such a thing as a comfortable 42 km run???).

Anyways, that is the latest status update. Again, good luck to everyone who is training. Keep it up and soon all your hard work will pay off!

David